Where does the information in the plan come from?
All the information provided in the plan comes from the medical literature, established practice guidelines or the recommendations of experts in the survivorship field.

Can I use the program to create care plans for patients in my clinic?
Absolutely! We want the care plan to be a useful resource to help oncology clinics around the world meet the needs of their cancer survivors.

Can you list local resources in the plan?
Because the care plan is a national and international resource, we do not include local resources. We suggest that each clinic create a handout of favorite local resources to be distributed along with the care plan.

What is the best way to distribute the plan?
Your patient's plan can be printed out, either to hand them a hard copy, or to keep a copy in their chart. However, it is best viewed online, as this is the only way to maintain the web links within the care plan. We encourage healthcare providers to either save the plan as a PDF and then email it, or email it directly from the care plan program- both methods will allow the patient to utilize the links within the plan.

Can I save a plan I am working on?
Unfortunately, you cannot. We do not want to store a patient's treatment information, therefore we decided not to allow the saving of plans in progress. The good news is that the plan takes health care providers an average 4-5 minutes to complete.

Do I need to register?
No, the program is free to use, and requires no registration.

What do you do with the user's answers to the questionnaire?
We collect the answers to conduct ongoing research, and to guide periodic improvements to the program. All answers are kept confidential and are used in de-identified aggregate data form.

Why don't you ask for chemotherapy or radiation doses?
This program was originally created with the survivor as the primary user, though this has changed over time. We felt that patients would not necessarily know the dose of chemotherapy or radiation that they received. We also found that there is no evidence that the dose would change recommendations for survivorship care. Furthermore, we were concerned that asking for specific doses may deter users, so we opted not to ask about doses.

Why can't I include a patient's dose in the plan?
It is important to distinguish the OncoLink care plan from a treatment summary. The treatment summary is used to provide the patient and other healthcare providers with information such as surgery information, pathology results, chemotherapy and radiation treatment plans and courses, including the doses. The OncoLink Care Plan is not a treatment summary. Feel free to use our treatment summary template to create this document for your patient.

What is the "Primary Care Summary"?
The primary care summary is a short summary and a bullet point list of the recommendations in the patient's care plan, which the patient can share with their primary care team or other healthcare provider involved in their care.

How can I test the program for myself or demonstrate for others in my clinic?
Because we use the data from patient care plans for research and to guide changes and enhancements, we ask that if you are creating a test or sample plan, type "TEST" into the text box under the type of surgery question. This will allow us to exclude those answers from analysis.

Does my patient need to be present when I fill out the questionnaire?
We have heard this done both ways- some HCPs prefer to create plans the day before clinic, without the patient present, while some choose do it with the patient present. There are 2 "pathways" for the program, patient and HCP. Your answer to the question "What is your relationship to the patient?" determines which of these pathways you enter.

If you answer "HCP completing the plan with patient present", "Patient" or "Family member" to the question about your relationship to the patient, you will enter the patient pathway, which will ask you questions about what side effects the patient is experiencing and sort their results based on these responses. Issues they are experiencing will appear first with other effects following them. No side effects will be eliminated based on these responses.

If you choose "HCP completing without the patient present", you will enter the HCP pathway, which will not ask questions about potential side effects and will allow you to remove side effects you believe are not relevant for this patient.